The Tumbleweed Factory

from an unstable development branch to a fully rolling binary distro

openSUSE Factory is the head development branch for the openSUSE
distribution releases. As such the explosive mixture of changes and
new versions throughout the whole stack from kernel to the desktops
made openSUSE Factory a challenging distribution to use even for
hard core distribution hackers. To make Factory usable for a wider
audience of distribution developers it had to be made more stable
while retaining the short turnaround times needed for a bleeding
edge distribution. openSUSE therefore introduced a number of automated
and semi-automated tools for review and QA into the development
workflow to reach that goal. The result is now called openSUSE
Tumbleweed, a fully rolling binary distribution based on openSUSE
Factory. This talk explains the development process and the tools
used to turn openSUSE Factory into Tumbleweed.

Target audience are distribution integrators in general. All of them
have problems like "does this new dracut submission break the
installer or render the system unbootable?". With the process used
by openSUSE many such questions can be answered by the machine,
automatically. The process outlined in this talk is not only useful
for rolling distributions like Tumbleweed but also for stable
releases. It helped significantly to increase the quality resp avoid
regressions between beta and RC versions during the release process.